Issue 12
Fall 2002
Janet Buck
Janet Buck is a three-time Pushcart Nominee and the author of four collections of poetry. Her work has recently appeared in Three Candles, Red River, Pierian Springs, Stirring, PoetryBay, PW Review, Offcourse, The American Muse, and hundreds of journals world-wide. In 2002-2003 Buck's poetry is scheduled to appear in Zuzu's Petals Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Artemis, The Montserrat Review, Recursive Angel, The Foliate Oak, Southern Ocean Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Coelacanth, Cordite, CrossConnect, and The Oklahoma Review. For links to more of Janet's poetry, see: http://members.aol.com/jbuck22874/whatsnew.html http://www.janetbuck.com
Knocking at the Locking Door
Surrounded by a pungent sea of forest pines,
the world seems tall and I feel short.
Memories our hands won't touch
are brittle cones lacing the floor to the lake.
Its indigo blue -- a blending of chills,
orange suns, protruding rocks
we've never climbed.
You flat refuse to come to me,
to make that painful stretch.
All my paltry syllables
are biscuits held in open palms.I watch a woman feed a deer.
Its lissome gait a piece of art
examining the missing risk.
How is that she trusts a stranger
in the fog and I can't even shovel snow.
We always have that yellow tape
tied around a murder scene
any time it comes to grief.
Every word I've ever scribed
is knocking at a locking door.Your coffee table says to air:
"My daughter is a published writer."
Still the binding proves the cloying diffidence.
Unbroken as I crash to earth
in search of pillows or a nest.
I'd love to have a fire tonight --
love to watch it turn
the twigs of lies to ash.
Tears of witness, incense
in unscented grass
could be our rheumy kerosene.
Wet BroomsSuddenly, post severance
a pant leg hangs like fallen flags.
Is this the muslin of defeat
or will some shade of color return?
I'm barely eight and all my dolls
have better bodies sitting there.
Each step I take, a damp
and clotted wispy broom
brushing a usurping floor.
If this is just a Civil War, I'll name
my flesh the smitten South
and hope the North of soul will win.Years and eyes would teach me well
to stay away from bathroom mirrors.
Their microphones are hideous.
The stump itself a purple eggplant,
giant squash, rhubarb ribs
in gardens no one understands.
Mattress slabs and negligees
reserved for beauty not the beast
with suffer's crumbs for daily bread.
Phantoms strike like seizures in electric chairs.
When lights are out, I finger
all my sister's shoes in pristine rows --
their symbols make a fine ballet
I'd love to have a ticket to.Who put this halo on my head,
plagued me with these platitudes:
"God gives you only giant bricks
you have the strength to move and lift."
I hate the words but lean on them like banisters
on stairways washed away in floods.
I had a better signature when two legs waltzed
without pre-meditated scorn.
When motion was a thoughtless gesture
flapping like an eagle's wings.
When fluid crosses of my thighs
weren't rancid jokes imbued with scars.
Fallow muscles ... well, they dream
of Cinderella slipper time,
of petticoats not made of gauze.
Red EyesThe elocution of torn rags,
petty squabbles over land,
loaded rifles, tracks of tanks
like asteroids gone crazy
in this hemisphere
brought us to this tired fork --
where buses could be
bombs on wheels, where roads lead
straight from fence to fence.
Pitch, the darkness is pitch,
an unrelenting form of tar.
Somewhere in Afghanistan
a sea of children starves for milk,
considers rice and school books
the caviar of silk elite.
The color of communion wine
wasted in stampeding terror.We're all still red around the rim,
remembering the choice-less ash,
scores of lambs and skeletons
that had no proper funeral.
To let the bed sore sorrow heal
presumes forgetting horror
that will never lift.
Hartshorn tears and lurid scars
spread like restless spirits now.
Somewhere near the Pentagon
another autumn rolls its mulch.
Tawny leaves are clinging
to their guarded green.
Somewhere in the foggy Bronx,
a widow and a widower
toss one toothbrush in the trash.